This field, which encompases all aspects of science and technology, is involved with things on a smaller scale. Creative people from all technical disciplines have important contributions to make. You are encouraged to join the excitement.
Things behave substantially differently in the micro domain. Forces related to volume, like weight and inertia, tend to decrease in significance. Forces related to surface area, such as friction and electrostatics, tend to become large. And forces like surface tension that depend upon an edge become enormious. It takes awhile to get one's micro intuition sorted out. -- An ant carrying many times its weight or a water bug walking on the surface of a pond are just two manifestations of this different micro world.
Micromechanics deals with micromechanisms which fall into two broad categories: sensors and actuators. Since sensors measure some property of their environment internal sensor power dissipation should be minimized and sensor sensitivity must be maximized. In force sensing power dissipation has been reduced by ten decades in twenty years. Sensitivity has been increased by twelve decades and is now being limited by thermal noise problems. Practical force sensing via mechanically resonant devices which can be powered by unmodulated light and sensed by optical reflections has been demonstrated and has major implications on future sensing systems. Actuators are devices which do work on their environment. The tool to produce micro actuators is still a major problem. X-ray assisted processing with very large structural heights satisfies most of the tool requirements for micro actuators. It and assembly have been used to produce magnetic actuators such as rotational motors with 120 ,A5(Bm rotors and rotational speeds to 150,000 rpm. A generic, linear electrostatic actuator with large travel and large output force per unit chip area addresses practical markets for this evolving technology.
Micromechatronics had been an enormous advance in everything, since toys, hard disk, and a endeless list of device, the future is to make more a more small devices, until we arrive to a physics limit, due to this miniaturization, other problems has arise, like temperature, friction forces, inertia, etc. its not only make the device smaller and smaller, it is not just copy the big one, and make the small one, unfortunetly that is not so simple and easy, because when we have a small device, the friction forces are very important.
Other countries like Japan and United States of America had a big advantage in this field, they have doing amazings devices, like small flies, ants, it has a lot of applications specially in medicine and in the army, maybe in a few yearswe could get operate by smalls ants inside our bodies, destroing tumors and helping to maintain the body in optimum conditions.
Imagine a machine so small that it is imperceptible to the human eye. Imagine working machines with gears no bigger than a grain of pollen. Imagine these machines being batch fabricated tens of thousands at a time, at a cost of only a few pennies each. Imagine a realm where the world of design is turned upside down, and the seemingly impossible suddenly becomes easy. A place where gravity and inertia are no longer important, but the effects of atomic forces and surface science dominate. Welcome to the microdomain, a world now occupied by an explosive new technology known as MEMS (MicroElectroMechanical Systems) or, more simply, micromachines. MEMS is the next logical step in the silicon revolution. The silicon revolution began over three decades ago, with the introduction of the first integrated circuit. The integrated circuit has changed virtually every aspect of our lives. The hallmark of the integrated circuit industry over the past three decades has been the exponential increase in the number of transistors incorporated onto a single piece of silicon. This rapid advance in the number of transistors per chip leads to integrated circuits with continuously increasing capability and performance. As time has progressed, large, expensive,complex systems have been replaced by small, high performance,inexpensive integrated circuits. While the growth in the functionality of microelectronic circuits has been truly phenomenal, for the most part this growth has been limited to the processing power of the chip.
MEMS is a relatively new technology which exploits the existing microelectronics infrastructure to create complex machines with micron feature sizes. These machines can have many functions,including sensing, communication and actuation. Extensive applications for these devices exist in both commercial and defense systems. Recent studies by Systems Planning Corporation have estimated the market for Intelligent Micromachine based systems to be around $100 Billion/year.
In conclusion, micromechanics devices now are more important that never, the logic way it's that they become smaller and smaller, this kind of devices already are everywhere, but in the future, every electric or electronic devices is going to have a lot of micromechanics devices, maybe the most important field for that is medicine and army. So USA, and countries like Japan, are going to develop that micromechanicals devices in the future.